InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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How to Improve Software Team Performance with Experimentation
According to Terhi Aho, experimentation is a way of thinking that guides action. By experimenting we can develop ways of working without a major change process. It can help software teams to solve problems in small steps, relieve their workload, and foster self-management.
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Planning, Automation and Monorepo: How Monzo Does Code Migrations Across 2800 Microservices
Monzo products are supported by an extensive microservice-based platform of over 2800 services. The company relies on planning and heavy automation to drive code migrations at scale and leverages config service to support gradual roll forwards and quick rollbacks in case of issues. Migrations are managed by a central team rather than service owner teams to avoid delays and inconsistencies.
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Enabling Fast Flow in Software Organizations
Resolving impediments to flow and removing unnecessary sources of cognitive load can make culture issues disappear in organisations, Nigel Kersten argued. Start with a clear strategy that is easy to communicate, then follow the path to creating stream-aligned teams and platform teams, he suggested.
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How a Game of Patterns Can Help Software Organisations to Gain Insights and Improve
Patterns can help us to understand how things work and how cultures develop. The game in an organisational system is about recognizing patterns and anti-patterns. According to Tiani Jones, leaders should work on the system rather than in the system and create the conditions for the development and sustainment of good patterns in software organisations.
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Booking.com Doubles Delivery Performance Using DORA Metrics and Micro Frontends
The team in Booking.com’s fintech business unit implemented a series of improvements across the backend and the frontend of its platform and was able to double the delivery performance, as measured by DORA metrics. Additionally, the Micro Frontends (MFE) pattern was used to break up the monolithic FE application into multiple decomposed apps that could be deployed separately.
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Improving Retrospective Effectiveness with End-of-Year and Focus Retrospectives
Doing end-of-year retrospectives can help to improve the effectiveness of agile retrospectives, by focusing on the actions done and the formats used. To increase the impact of retrospectives we can alternate between “global galactic” and focus retrospectives.
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Effective Retrospectives Require Skilled Facilitators
Retrospective facilitators can develop their facilitation skills by self-study and training, and by doing retrospectives. Better retrospective facilitation can lead to higher effectiveness of change and impact the progress of an organization.
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Getting Feedback When Your Colleagues Are Also Your Customers
Getting and using feedback from colleagues who are also customers using your product can improve the quality of the product and help to improve the way of working. In this situation, it’s easier to receive feedback, but you can get overloaded by it.
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How Removing Staging Environments Can Improve Your Deployments
Squeaky - a company which helps businesses to understand how visitors are using their website or web app without invading their privacy - have outlined why they don’t use a staging environment. They believe that this helps them to ship faster, and lower the number of issues found in production.
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How Mob Programming Collective Habits Can be the Soil for Growing Technical Quality
Mob programming can support teams in changing old habits into new effective habits for creating products in an agile way. Collectively-developed habits are hard to forget when you have other people around. Mob programming forces individuals to put new habits into practice regularly, making them easier to adopt. Teams are intolerant of repetition, looking for better ways of doing their work.
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How a Test Strategy Helped to Increase Deployment Maturity and Product Quality
Implementing a test strategy helped an organization to move away from push and pray deployment toward continuous and confident deployment to production. The organization mapped their test strategy in a framework with different enablers, which has helped them align on quality metrics for the whole product together with a strong safety net of tests before moving to production.
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InfoQ Live August 17th: Deep-Dive in Cloud Native, CI/CD, Service Mesh, and More
Practically every development team would benefit from building and running applications that use the advantages of the cloud computing delivery model. This August 17th at InfoQ Live, software leaders dive into topics such as service mesh, CI/CD, cloud native best practices and pitfalls, and more. Join them and book your spot now for just $19.95.
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InfoQ Live July 20th: Software Supply Chain for DevOps & Reducing Feature Flag Debt
How can modern DevOps practices accelerate your software delivery without the quality issues? Learn how automation, continuous testing, and supply management techniques can improve software quality and speed of delivery. Get valuable insights from world-class domain experts at InfoQ Live on July 20th.
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How Kanban Can Support Evolutionary Change
Evolutionary change is about starting where you are and improving one small change at a time. You need a stressor, a reflection mechanism, and an act of leadership to provoke change and institutionalize it. Understanding empathy allows change agents to find out what resonates with someone and work around resistance.
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The Benefits of Nostalgia: Q&A with Linda Rising
Remembering the past can bring about benefits; nostalgic reflection can make us more optimistic. Looking back leads us to feel there is meaning and purpose in our lives which enables us to better navigate the future and help us move forward.